California’s Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) has quietly begun replacing Smart Meters with analog meters for citizens reporting adverse health effects. Consumer rights and other groups demanded immediately that their wireless devices be removed from their homes.
Joshua Hart of stopsmartmeters.org reported the good news just as PG&E deploys the last phase of its smart meters in California. The Department of Energy’s promise that the smart grid and smart meters will lower electricity costs has proven incorrect; on the contrary, the utility costs have skyrocketed.
Millions of customers were unhappy with their Smart Meters. They are surveillance devices in homes, without a search warrant, which is a violation of privacy. Fires, explosions, and health issues ranging from nausea, dizziness, heart palpitations, headaches, tinnitus, insomnia, and radiation exposure associated with powerful wireless devices that transmit information 6-8 per minute constantly, have plagued the stealthy and deceptive installation.
California’s counties and cities have demanded a stop to smart meter installation and some local governments passed laws prohibiting wireless meters. Nevada’s Pacific Utilities Company (PUC) called for investigation into the adverse health effects and other smart meter issues.
Recently, the California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey assured customers that the utility “will provide for you to go back to the analog meter if that’s your choice.” The problem is that most Americans have no idea how damaging these smart meters are and an even larger group of Americans have never heard of it or see it as a contribution to “save” the planet because that is how these meters were sold to the public.
The tired rhetoric said that the smart grid and smart meters save the planet from doom and gloom, reduce waste by cutting your electricity at peak usage, eliminates the reader who must go to each home to calculate their monthly consumption, reduces your carbon footprint, and it will make the planet “green.” The reality is very far from the disingenuous promises.
Californians’ electric bills have almost tripled and lawsuits ensued. Marylanders swelter without electricity six hours at the peak of summer and almost freeze six hours in the dead of winter. An analog meter user who insisted on keeping it has to pay $35 each month to have his meter read by the power company. Thousands of customers across the country are having severe health issues from radiation that are not being addressed.
Millions are having issues with the power company selling wireless data collected from their homes via smart meters to third parties. Anybody with a handheld device can capture information from your home and sell it to a third party. The utility company knows if you are home, if you are away, if you are on vacation, which lights are turned on, which appliances, which computers, TVs, and other devices in your home.
Caitlin Phillips of Santa Cruz, Ca, who had suffered severe headaches and other symptoms from her smart meter, became the first person for whom PG&E re-installed on October 28, 2011 the classic analog meter. Caitlin Phillips had told the Wellington Energy installer, a subcontractor of PG&E, that she did not want a smart meter. “When I returned home later, I discovered a smart meter on my house. That night I awoke to severe anxiety, headache, and buzzing in my teeth, and realized the new smart meter was on the other side of the wall from my bed.”
Caitlin received help from “Stop Smart Meters” group who referred her to sources to obtain an analog meter and a person to install it. Her symptoms disappeared immediately after the analog meter was installed.
Caitlin spoke to a commission meeting in San Francisco about her ordeal and, a week later PG&E crews replaced her temporary analog meter with an official PG&E analog meter. Her frustration, pain, and suffering were finally over.
An “opt-out” proceeding is currently overseen by an Administrative Law Judge at the California Public Utilities Commission. “There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people suffering in their homes from forced ‘smart’ meter radiation,” said Joshua Hart, Director of the grassroots organization Stop Smart Meters!
PG&E and other utilities have responded to health complaints by replacing wireless ‘smart’ meters with digital meters that are “wireless-ready.” These digital meters have been associated with health problems from “dirty electricity” frequencies that pass into a home via the electrical wiring. Digital meters have been rejected by customers who still report health issues after installation. (Joshua Hart)
Susan Brinchman, Director of the San Diego based Center for Electrosmog Prevention, said, “At this point, the burden of responsibility is on the utilities to demonstrate that any new meter they want to install on our homes is safe. Communities have the right to retain analog meters at no extra charge.”
While California is pushing back the not so smart wireless technology, places like northern Virginia are going full steam ahead with the installation. Dominion Power has completed placing 100,000 smart meters in a pilot phase in three counties.
“There are hundreds of thousands- if not millions- of people suffering in their homes from forced ‘smart’ meter radiation,” said Joshua Hart, Director of the grassroots organization Stop Smart Meters! “The utilities must respond promptly to all requests that analogs be returned. The alternative is that people will increasingly turn to independent professionals to remove unwanted ‘smart’ meters from their homes, a reasonable action we assert is within our legal rights. Protecting your family’s health is not tampering.”
